Name: Star Wars
Release Date: 1977
Director: George Lucas
Writer: George Lucas

Cast:
Mark Hamill: Luke Skywalker
Harrison Ford: Han Solo
Sir Alec Guinness: Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi
Carrie Fisher: Princess Leia Organa
Peter Cushing: Grand Moff Tarkin
Anthony Daniels: C-3PO
Kenny Baker: R2-D2
Peter Mayhew: Chewbacca
David Prowse: Darth Vader

Run-Time: 121 mins.
Studio: 20th Century Fox

Writing in the English newspaper The Guardian on Tuesday, Gary Kurtz, confesses that there once was a time he thought that a little science fiction flick he made with this guy named George Lucas was just a movie.

Star Wars, just a movie?

If you’re a filmgoer of a certain age, or, more likely one of the countless millions who have thrilled to the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia since they hit the silver screen 34 years ago, this is kind of like saying the World Series is just a baseball game. Or “Moby Dick” was just some book.

But Kurtz, who acted as producer on the original trilogy (or is it Trinity?), confesses in The Guardian that he and Lucas were just trying to make a movie all those years ago — not a pop culture juggernaut:

“When George Lucas and I began planning the first film, we had no idea what it would become; the kind of devotion it would attract. We planned to make this film that would capture the feel of the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s, which we had seen on TV in the early-60s.

We soon realized that we had found a niche. Star Wars arrived in cinemas when a lot of science-fiction was gloomy and post-apocalyptic. There hadn’t really been a hit movie designed to thrill the soul about the prospect of outer space as the final frontier since Forbidden Planet in 1955 – this was a few years before the first Star Trek movie, remember.”

In the dawn of the 1990s, when the Big Three networks still used to show studio films on Sunday nights, and not the exploits of maladjusted people desperate for the spotlight, “Star Wars” was shown on CBS.

As I recall, this was the film’s network television debut — when that kind of thing used to still count for something. And before the film was screened, they aired a documentary about the history of the movie.

In one pivotal scene, the interviewed filmgoers outside faceless movie theater in some faceless suburb somewhere. In turn, each admitted that they’d seen “Star Wars” 50 times, or 75 times or 100 times.

I saw myself in them: By the age of 21, I’d seen the first film more than 100 times. My friends and I, who were 13 by the time “Return of the Jedi” hit the theaters in 1983, felt like the movies belonged to us.

We owned the toys. We’d reenacted key scenes on the playground — each of us dueling over who’d get to be Luke or Han, and, thus win the attentions of the 3rd grade girl drafted in to play Leia.

We felt the darkness that permeated the second film, 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back,” and still the series’ strongest entry.

And if you mention Carrie Fisher and her solid gold bikini in “Jedi,” you will still get an appreciative grin and the hormones of men in their 40s — each with jobs, wives, mortgages and children — will fire at pubescent levels. Some of us — if we were very lucky — may also have convinced past girlfriends or wives to don the iconic outfit.

And when the original movies were reissued in 1997 with added footage, we lined up and plunked down our $6 to see them. The extra footage brought some enjoyment — the exploding Death Star at the end of “Star Wars” was particularly vivid. But in a lot of ways, it was like meeting an old girlfriend and finding she’d had a ton of plastic surgery done. She was beautiful without it, and the newly tightened skin looked artificial.

The first generation of fans held our breath when Lucas announced the release of the long-awaited prequels. We rushed to the theaters to see “The Phantom Menace,” only to learn that one of the greatest pop culture epics of all time had been sparked by a dispute over tax policy. The only way it could have been more boring was if the fight between good and evil had been caused by a dispute over a zoning variance.

We were also horrified to find that that the living embodiment of all evil, Darth Vader, wasn’t much more than a spacebound Goth who’d apparently listened to a few too many My Chemical Romance albums.

So while it may have been true that Gary Kurtz and George Lucas were just trying to make a movie in 1975, when they set out to make the first “Star Wars” film, by 1997, nothing could have been further from the truth.

A quarter of a century later, Lucas was the possessor of a property worth incalculable billions of dollars. And that second triptych of movies felt less like a tyro filmmaker’s efforts to recapture the magic of Hollywood serials of his youth, and more like the cynical machinations of a tycoon who knew he had a core audience that would eagerly lap up any crumbs he chose to feed them. He also, no doubt knew, that the horrid Jar-Jar Binks would move a ton of merch.

Last fall came word that Lucas intends to reissue all six films, starting with Phantom Menace and ending with Jedi, in 3-D, starting in 2012.

Assuming Lucas re-releases the films at a rate of one per-year, I’ll be 48 years old by the time “Jedi” hits my local multiplex.

That’s a galaxy far, far away from the 7-year-old boy who saw “Star Wars” in a stuffy theater in suburban Connecticut during the blazingly hot summer of 1977.

My daughter will be on the cusp of young womanhood by then. And if we go to the movies together — and I hope we will — I can’t help but wonder if she will see the same things I saw in them four decades ago.

Will she feel that same sense of derring-do? Will she feel the hot sun of Tattooine on her face? Will she hold her breath when Han Solo is frozen in carbonite?

Or will she react like Lucas and Kurtz as young men — will it just be a movie churned out to make a buck and then forgotten as soon as the closing credits roll?